Bagehot

In thrall to the brothers

Ed Miliband doesn’t love to be beside the seaside with trade unionists

FOR an optimistic glimpse of contemporary Britain, Bagehot recommends a trip to Bournemouth pier. One of southern England’s historic and still popular resort towns, Bournemouth marries an appealing whiff of nostalgia—the sandy beach worshipped by pre-easyJet generations, the pier with its amusement arcades—with affluent, glass-fronted modernity. The town is an outpost of the financial services industry: there were more suits aboard the 6.30am train from London than day-trippers.

In a convention centre overlooking the pier this week, the annual conference of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) struggled to achieve a similar effect. It failed. Britain’s trade unions, though still a significant and often positive force in the workplace, are jaded at best. In the past three decades their membership has halved, to around 6.5m, and is now concentrated in the public sector. The turnout in Bournemouth was at an historic low. Despite a smattering of prominently seated “youth delegates”, whose every grumble was enthusiastically applauded, most looked to be approaching retirement age. The rhetoric of the conference, its notes of defiance and promises of struggle, resistance and industrial action, was even more dated. “Thank you for an excellent debate!” enthused the moderator, after yet another motion—this one on the minimum wage—was passed unanimously without a whisper of dissent. In post-Thatcherite, austerity Britain, where bad jobs are better than no jobs and only a small minority of hirelings join a union unbidden, the conference was as nostalgic as the “I still hate Thatcher” mugs for sale in the lobby or the “kiss-me-quick” hats on the pier.

This was an illustration of why Ed Miliband, who addressed the conference on September 10th, says he wants to reform the relationship between his Labour Party and the unions, which founded the party in 1900 and still pay most of its bills. The money—amounting to over £36m in the past three years alone—comes mainly in the form of a pro forma “affiliation fee”, extracted from the 3m members of those unions formally aligned with Labour. This is another outworn arrangement. The donors are not asked if they wish to contribute to Labour’s coffers or told why they should; recent polling suggests up to a third vote Conservative. But the benefit to their union bosses is obvious. They control just under half the seats on Labour’s national executive committee and half the vote at the party’s annual conference; their members cast a third of the votes in the party’s leadership elections.

The relationship has long been awkward. Union bosses complain that their influence is less than it seems, the party committee and conference being alike enfeebled. Most Labour leaders—especially Tony Blair, who disdained the brothers—now consider them an embarrassment. Being in hock to the unions makes it hard to attack the Tories on their even murkier, corporate sources of funding. Nonetheless, the arrangement has been so indispensable to Labour, Britain’s most indebted party, that no one dared change it—until Mr Miliband, in a startling speech in July, vowed to abolish the system of affiliate memberships and thereby, he said, hasten “the death throes of the old politics”.

His motive was not purely idealistic. It was alleged that apparatchiks of Unite, Labour’s biggest union donor, had attempted to rig proceedings in the Scottish constituency of Falkirk to secure a Labour candidacy for one of their own. This was cripplingly embarrassing for Mr Miliband, because the unions were instrumental to his 2010 leadership election. He would not have beaten his older and more widely admired brother David without their support. As the Tories whooped, calling him a slave to Unite, Mr Miliband therefore felt compelled to sever the cord. Many in Labour were appalled: Mr Miliband was jeopardising his party’s most reliable source of cash. Others rejoiced: Mr Miliband, a noted ditherer, appeared at last to be taking bold action. Almost all agreed that this was a decisive moment in his leadership.

Brother Ed, what art thou?

That is why Mr Miliband’s performance in Bournemouth was so depressing. The problem was not the fact that his speech to the brothers was mainly received in hostile silence. The change he had promised would sideline them, so they were naturally unhappy. It was that Mr Miliband, with so much at stake, appeared suddenly less sure of his “transformational, extraordinary” plan.

He mentioned it only briefly. Most of his address was little better than a cut-and-paste job from previous speeches, including a stream of pledges to make Britain a fairer, nicer place, but hardly any concrete proposal on how this might be done. It got worse. An aide to Mr Miliband suggested he had no concomitant plan to withdraw the unions’ voting rights.

That did not sound like a renaissance. It sounded like a stitch-up. It suggests the unions are going to lose their obligation to fund Labour, but not their sway over it. It may even increase, because Mr Miliband will hope to persuade the unions to continue bankrolling Labour on a discretionary basis. This—18 months before Britain’s next general election—perhaps explained Mr Miliband’s apparent climbdown. It may have saved Labour from penury; but it also looks like a bad blow to its leader’s already-tottering authority.

Mr Miliband is accruing a reputation for this sort of thing. On Britain’s stuttering economy and the soaring cost of living, on Syria and public concerns over immigration, he has proved adept at defining the problem, poetic in his promise to eradicate it, only then to indicate, on further reflection, that he doesn’t have much of a solution after all. This is no way to impress his party, let alone the wider electorate, with or without a union war-chest behind him. On September 24th, at Labour’s annual conference, Mr Miliband will have another chance to allay the growing concerns about his fitness to lead Labour and Britain. After his performance in Bournemouth, this is going to be even harder.